Month: January 2005

The Poorman throws a cyber-bucket of icewater on John Derbyshire’s head.

These NRO Corner people are evil. If anyone called Derbyshire on his comments, I couldn’t find it. It’s implausible to imagine that they haven’t seen the photos.

From NYT magazine:

I hear one of the balls will be reserved for troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Yes, the Commander-in-Chief Ball. That is new. It will be about 2,000 servicemen and their guests. And that should be a really fun event for them.

As an alternative way of honoring them, did you or the president ever discuss canceling the nine balls and using the $40 million inaugural budget to purchase better equipment for the troops?

I think we felt like we would have a traditional set of events and we would focus on honoring the people who are serving our country right now — not just the people in the armed forces, but also the community volunteers, the firemen, the policemen, the teachers, the people who serve at, you know, the — well, it’s called the StewPot in Dallas, people who work with the homeless.

How do any of them benefit from the inaugural balls?

I’m not sure that they do benefit from them.

Then how, exactly, are you honoring them?

Honoring service is what our theme is about.

via wonkette

Via James Wolcott, we have an article from The Economist detailing the American military’s tactics in the insurgent hotbed Al Anbar Province:

In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching within 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: “If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,” says a bullish lieutenant. “It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.”

Read the whole thing.

Jeff Jarvis attempts to compare Saddam Hussein to the tsunami disaster. In a post titled Catastrophic equivalencies, he says:

By the latest count, 160,000 people have died in this tsunami.

A month ago, Tony Blair said that 400,000 victims of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and murder have been found in mass graves in Iraq.

Both are humanitarian tragedies, humanitarian issues, humanitarian needs.

In Jeff’s rush to come up with a number documenting what he thinks he already knows, he grabs, off the US Aid website, a quote by Tony Blair that Blair himself admitted was false long ago.

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.

In that publication – Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: ‘We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.’

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: ‘The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.’

The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports ‘to the outer limits’ in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

I find it rather repulsive that Jarvis, who vocally supported the Iraq invasion on his widely-read blog, is using the tsunami disaster to opportunistically ride his pro-war hobby horse, but to repeat such a widely discredited factoid as Blair’s mass-grave numbers is simply irresponsible. Not only did he fail to research the discredited quote but he attributed it to Blair in the wrong year.

Sistani-endorsed United Iraqi Alliance, represented by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and Ahmed Chalabi held a press conference today. The shocker: “We will need American forces to be in Iraq for the foreseeable future.”

That position is likely to be a surprise to average Shiite voters, who largely believe that the election is all about kicking the occupation out.

Yes, I read other blogs besides Clark’s but this is too funny:

The “blog of the year” proves its worth by announcing some good news from Iraq …

So, read Clark’s post and then read this one from Raed Jarrar.

Clark: IT WAS REPORTED ON A BLOG, WHICH MAKES IT MUCH MORE RELIABLE THAN ANYTHING IN THE DREADED MSM!

UPDATE: Arthur puts the final nail in the coffin of this spam email the “Blog of the Year” posted as news.